


Season for All Things

by cheloniidae



Category: BioShock
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 03:52:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5897254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Jack thinks about Andrew Ryan, and one time he stops.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Season for All Things

Jack sits in silence on the examination table, harsh lights turning skin that’s never seen the sun even paler as Mister Fontaine mutters and rifles through the papers Mama Tenenbaum gave him. His back is rod-straight; when Fontaine visits, fear keeps Jack on his best behavior.

He listens as closely as he can, even though half of what Fontaine says has no meaning to him. And there it is, for the hundredth time— that name. Andrew Ryan. (Followed immediately by a word that makes Mama Tenenbaum frown when Jack repeats it.)

The name feels important. Jack’s four months of life have taught him what the reward for curiosity is, but that can’t stop him from wondering. He wonders who Ryan is, and what he does, and why Mister Fontaine hates him so much.

If Mister Fontaine doesn’t like him, he can’t be all bad. Jack makes a promise to himself: once he unscrews the cover from the air vent above his bed, he’s going to meet Andrew Ryan.

* * *

 The drenched sweater clings to him like a second skin, sapping the heat from his body and forcing the ocean’s chill deeper into his bones. Jack wraps his arms around himself, shivering, as the bathysphere descends.

The banner in the lighthouse and the statue that loomed over him crowd out his thoughts of the airplane. (Why can’t he remember the crash, why can’t he—) No kings, the banner proclaimed, but with a statue like that he isn’t convinced. And the name on the bronze plaque— he’s heard it before. He tries and tries to catch the memory, but it slips through his grasp, as slippery as the fish outside.

“I am Andrew Ryan,” a recording begins. Jack can do nothing but listen to this — sermon, is all he can think to call it — as the bathysphere ferries him to a place that shouldn’t be possible. Ryan talks of rejecting God, rejecting the government, choosing something new. “—unbound by petty morality,“ he says, as though it’s an achievement to be proud of.

Jack can’t explain his bitter disappointment any more than he can explain how he knows what a bathysphere is called. There’s a gnawing feeling in him, a half-formed thought: he expected Ryan to be better.

* * *

The key to Rapture is heavier than a gun in his hand. He's alone in Point Prometheus, no company but the ringing in his ears and the sharp pain in the back of his head from being thrown to the floor. Jack remembers, dreamlike, watching himself wipe Fontaine’s blood off the Little Sisters’ mouths before sending them back to Tenenbaum. They sang as they crawled into the vents.

Six children succeeded where two Ryans failed. His father would hate it, and that’s nearly as satisfying as the sight of Fontaine lying dead in a pool of his own blood. He wonders if this — the bone-deep feeling of justice, of a world set something closer to right — is what his father felt when he heard about the shootout at the fisheries.

He wonders if this is what he felt when he killed Langford.

He wonders if all three of them, hands stained too red to be washed clean, will find each other in Hell.

* * *

The instant Jack finds the preparatory academy, he wishes he hadn’t. It’s a shrine to everything he's afraid of turning into. Chalkboards decry the evils of sharing and empathy; a poster instructs children to always shoot to kill. When he sees the bottles of Possession, fire roars to life in his hand. _For the pacification of disruptive children_. If he could raze this school to the ground—

And the statue. His father, cast in bronze, holding a child’s hand and pointing into the distance. Ryan’s face is the gentlest he’s ever seen it— gentler than it ever was in life. The sculpted boy, frozen in some happy time that never was, looks up at Ryan with trusting admiration.

Jack is glad that child was never him.

* * *

Jack washes the dirt from his hands in one of Arcadia’s broken-down, half-flooded bathrooms. His palms are red and raw from the shovel’s wooden handle, and his arms are sore, but it’s a good kind of soreness. The kind that comes from doing a job that needed to be done.

His mother is at rest, now, buried in the gentle shade of something his father couldn’t kill.

His father, whose body is still rotting in his office. Jack hasn’t set foot there since Ryan forced him to bludgeon him to death. The splicers whisper about it— about a golf club, about Ryan’s own child killing him. Jack holds the key to the city, but Hephaestus is one place he never treads.

He can tell himself that it’s because he has more important work to do, which he does, or because Ryan doesn’t deserve it, which he doesn’t. But Jack knows the real reason, knows it like tracing the chains on his wrists, knows it like the sound of his father’s skull breaking: he’s too scared of what could be waiting for him to walk through those doors again.

(Ryan turned off the Vita-Chamber. Jack knows that, too.)

* * *

The house is too big and too empty with the girls gone away at college. Jack is proud of them, prouder than he’s ever been, but there’s a silence where their laughter used to be. He turns the television to its loudest volume and does the same with the record player, and the empty-quiet still lingers.

Thoughts rush in to fill the void like seawater through broken glass— _of_ seawater through broken glass. Thoughts of everything Jack spent the past fourteen years keeping locked in a corner of his head, because being a good father meant not waking the girls at night by screaming. Thoughts of an airplane, and a city, and _would you kindly_.

And Ryan.

The thoughts pull Jack, constant and relentless as gravity, towards the top shelf of his closet. For weeks, it’s been the same: open the closet, look at the box, walk away with fists clenched tight enough to turn his knuckles white. Repeat, repeat, repeat, like a puppet on a string. _You won't even walk until somebody says go._

(He’s in Rapture with a golf club in his hands, and his arms aren’t his.)

Today, he takes down the box and thinks: there are no strings. He brushes fourteen years’ worth of dust off the lid, and it hangs in the air, catching the sunlight.

He can’t explain why he took the audio diaries with him. Maybe he needed them as a reminder of what not to become; maybe he needed to keep something of the one man who never lied to him; maybe he needed proof that it all really happened. But the scars Ryan left are fading, slowly and surely, and Jack thinks—

He thinks it’s time to let go.

The road to the harbor is long and winding, full of chances to reconsider. He doesn’t.

He drops the recordings, one by one, off the side of the pier. Air bubbles up to the surface as his father’s words sink deeper and deeper into the Atlantic. Fragments of Rapture’s story, returning to depths where they belong. The last reminders of his father, gone.

And Jack Ryan feels, for the first time, that the ocean isn’t on his shoulders.


End file.
